The Washington Post announced Tuesday that it is eliminating more than 300 journalists—roughly one-third of its 800-person newsroom. The paper is shuttering its entire sports section, closing its books desk, suspending its flagship “Post Reports” podcast and gutting its foreign and metro coverage. The entire Middle East team was laid off, including the Cairo bureau chief. The Asia editor position was eliminated, along with the New Delhi and Sydney bureau chiefs. Correspondents covering China, Iran and Turkey were cut.
The layoffs at the Post are part of a wave of mass job cuts in 2026 that is on pace to eclipse 2025—itself one of the worst years of layoffs in recent history. In January alone, Amazon announced 16,000 corporate job cuts targeting core product and engineering roles, with over 2,000 in the Seattle area. UPS eliminated 30,000 positions on top of 48,000 cut in 2025, bringing cumulative layoffs to 78,000. The company is closing or reducing operations at 28 facilities. Pinterest cut 15 percent of its workforce. Meta laid off more than 1,000 workers in its Reality Labs division as it pivots from the metaverse to AI.
According to the Challenger, Gray & Christmas outplacement firm, US employers announced 1,206,374 job cuts in 2025—a 58 percent increase over the previous year and the highest level since the 2020 pandemic. This was the seventh-highest annual total since tracking began in 1989.
Post Executive Editor Matt Murray announced the cuts on an 8:30 a.m. Zoom call. In his remarks, Murray blamed the layoffs on artificial intelligence and other technological changes. He said that “Platforms like Search that shaped the previous era of digital news, and which once helped the Post thrive, are in serious decline. Our organic search has fallen by nearly half in the last three years. And we are still in the early days of AI-generated content, which is drastically reshaping user experiences and expectations.”
The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who purchased it in 2013 for $250 million, promising that his business interests would not affect the paper’s coverage. His net worth has soared from approximately $110 billion in 2022 to over $250 billion today. His wealth increase of $140 billion over four years could cover the Post’s reported $100 million annual losses for 1,400 years. Instead, Bezos is gutting the newsroom while using his fortune to curry favor with Trump.
In October 2024, Bezos ordered the Post not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years—even though the editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris and had written that Trump was unfit for office. More than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions in response.
In December 2024, Bezos donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago alongside Elon Musk. “I’m actually very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, Bezos said at the New York Times DealBook Summit, praising Trump’s plans to reduce regulation. Amazon then spent $75 million on a documentary about Melania Trump—$40 million for licensing and $35 million for marketing. The film generated just $7 million in its opening weekend.
Caroline O’Donovan, the Post’s Amazon beat reporter, wrote after being laid off: “Today I was laid off from my job covering Amazon for Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.” Reporter Emmanuel Felton said: “This wasn’t a financial decision, it was an ideological one.”
The technology sector led private industry with 154,445 cuts, up 15 percent from 2024. Government layoffs exploded by 703 percent to 308,167, driven largely by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was responsible for 293,753 federal job cuts. Warehousing saw a 317 percent increase to 95,317 cuts, while retail layoffs rose 123 percent to 92,989. Media companies cut 17,163 workers.
Meanwhile, hiring has collapsed. Employers announced only 507,647 planned hires in 2025—the lowest total since 2010 and a 34 percent decline from the previous year. The fourth quarter of 2025 saw the highest quarterly layoffs since 2008. A survey by Challenger found that 52 percent of respondents expect job cuts to accelerate further in 2026, while 41 percent expect them to continue at the high rates of 2025.
Pinterest’s layoffs included a revealing episode: CEO Bill Ready fired two engineers who had built an internal tool to track laid-off colleagues after management refused to disclose who was being cut. Ready called their effort to provide transparency “obstructionist behavior.”
Artificial intelligence is increasingly cited as justification for mass layoffs. According to Challenger, AI was responsible for 54,836 announced job cuts in 2025. Since 2023, when this category was first tracked, AI has been cited in 71,825 layoff announcements. Amazon, Microsoft, Workday, Salesforce, HP and Chegg have all pointed to AI investments as rationale for workforce reductions.
The impact of AI on the news industry has been substantial. According to industry analyses, Google’s AI Overviews have reduced click-through rates to news sites by 30 to 55 percent. AI chatbots provide virtually no referral traffic to publishers—their click-through rates are 96 percent lower than traditional search. A SearchEngineWorld study found that referral traffic from Google has dropped by up to 64 percent for some publishers. News organizations expect search traffic to fall 43 percent by 2029.
The layoffs of 2025 and 2026 have corresponded to a massive increase in the wealth of the financial oligarchy of which Bezos is a part. In the first year of Trump’s second term, the combined wealth of American billionaires grew by $1.5 trillion—a 22 percent increase—to $8.2 trillion. Elon Musk alone gained $305 billion, becoming the first person to surpass $700 billion in net worth.
The 15 richest Americans saw their wealth surge by 33 percent—more than double the rate of the stock market—gaining $800 billion collectively. The top 1 percent of US households now own 31.7 percent of all wealth, the highest share since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989.
The ruling class is committed to using artificial intelligence and automation—despite the fundamentally progressive character of this technology—as a battering ram against the working class. AI, which could reduce the burden of labor and expand access to information, is instead being deployed to eliminate jobs, suppress wages and concentrate wealth in ever fewer hands. The same billionaires who are laying off hundreds of thousands of workers are using their fortunes to purchase political influence and shape government policy in their interests.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties represent this financial oligarchy. The working class cannot defend its interests through either capitalist party but must build an independent socialist movement to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and place the resources of society under democratic control.